Digital printing systems can be constructed from two essential components. The first component is a print engine and the second component is a print controller. The print engine and controller units can be developed and implemented independently of one another, or integrated into the product that is ultimately manufactured. In general, the print controller handles communications and interfaces with a host system.
A print controller can also interpret print commands transmitted from the host and translate them into signals required to drive the print engine. Printing functions ranging from color management to duplexing generally depend on the interaction of the print engine and the controller. Digital print systems include, for example, desktop units, copy machines, printers, print-on-demand systems, and so forth.
One of the functions of a print controller is the ability to effectively enable a print stream format. A number of different print stream formats are utilized in the printing arts. A commonly utilized print stream format (also referred to herein as an “imaging data stream”) is the Line Conditioned Data Stream (LCDS), developed by Xerox Corporation of Stamford, Conn. LCDS is one type of an imaging data stream that can be utilized to drive, for example production printers. Unlike page description languages, which create pages from high-level graphical constructs, print command languages such as LCDS contain printer commands interspersed with data and are processed and executed sequentially.
Currently, printers implementing the LCDS printing language restrict the types of LCDS objects that can be referenced by LCDS commands. For example, LCDS forms can only be utilized in a FORM callout, images in an IMAGE callout, and so forth. A user wishing to reference an object without a callout other than its native callout must utilize offline tools to convert the object to the correct format, which is frequently a laborious, time consuming manual process. A need therefore exists for providing a mechanism and a methodology for an imaging data stream implementation, such as, but not limited to LCDS that allows any object content type to be utilized in any callout without reverting to manual conversion. Such a goal can be accomplished through the application of the imaging methods and systems, which are disclosed in further detail herein with respect to particular embodiments.